Sapien, a startup that incentivizes people to supply data for AI, has raised $10.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by VC firm Variant, with participation from Primitive Ventures, Animoca, Yield Game Guild, and HF0. The Sapien team aims to revolutionize data labeling.
Rowan Stone, former co-creator of Coinbase’s layer 2 network Base, and Trevor Koverko, founder of Polymath and author of RWA standard ERC1400, lead the firm. The founders are incentivizing data labeling workers with USDC stablecoin or reward points. Data work can range from labeling traffic signs to pinpointing cancer cells.
Sapien envisions creating new forms of work through a global pool of decentralized AI workers. “The big unlock that OpenAI found was that in order to help AI be smarter and get closer to human level reasoning, we need industrial-scale human labor,” said CEO Rowan Stone.
Sapien’s seed funding game changer
The firm is working to solve data-driven challenges for 17 large enterprise partners, including Alibaba and Baidu. Sapien has already recruited over a hundred thousand AI workers to provide data. Unlike some firms that rely on low-paid workers, Sapien wants to gamify this work and make it more engaging.
On-chain economics play a crucial role. Workers must invest collateral to participate, which they can earn or buy upfront. “If workers do good work, they are paid extra because they are valuable to us.
If they do bad work, cheat, or use bots, then we have a method to claw back some of that collateral,” Stone explained. Angel investors such as YGG founder Gabby Dizon and Softbank Vision Fund alum Kevin Jiang also participated in the seed funding.
